A Good Day to Die Hard (2013)

For those
at the helm of this appropriately ‘dying’ franchise it was a good time to start
trying hard, but John Moore’s “A Good Day to Die Hard” is sadly as dumb as most
action flicks fobbed off to the public, if not dumber. The action set-pieces have
clearly swallowed up a sizeable chunk of the budget, a vehicular pile-up which
leaves Willis’ John McClane and his estranged son Jack (Courtney) on the same
team a sequence bracing enough to grace an installment of the “Mission:
Impossible” series. It’s the only thing the filmmakers can be remotely proud
of, every other element of “A Good Day to Die Hard” as lazily conceived as even
the most routine actioners.

The plot involving Russian politicians is a laughably
cartoonish hark back to the days of Cold War propaganda, while Skip Woods’ script
attempts to inject an angst-ridden through-line narrative involving the father
and son’s tattered relationship mending itself through comradeship and
bloodthirsty identification with one another. The father-son bond is wholly unconvincing, both because Bruce Willis – clearly scrimping around for any buck he can get at
the moment – is as bemused with this story as half the audience I saw the film
with, and also because Jai Courtney is too old, and too much of a leading
presence, to be saddled with the role of Understudy. As if it wasn't enough to consign Eastern-European
politics to a series of sneering, bearded men grandstanding in bare ashen
rooms, the film dredges up the Chernobyl disaster to frame the murky
motivations of its villain, before McClane Sr. and McClane Jr. somehow manage
to leave the nuclear wasteland in a worse condition than they found it. What
sort of botched idea of heroism is that?